8: Looking Back, Looking Forward

Renewed national interest in improving adolescent literacy instruction comes at a time when adolescents face increasingly complex reading tasks in a rapidly changing world. Many adolescent boys, such as the three in this study, engage in rich, diverse reading practices. However, schools are often slow to respond to research-based instructional approaches that improve reading motivation, such as diverse text, more student choice, and explicit reading strategy instruction.

Adolescent boys continue to lag behind girls in reading achievement scores; however, solutions to decrease this gap often involve quick fixes like putting more “boy” books in the library. Fortunately, research studies like mine provide hope for improving boys' reading achievement and engagement. Teachers and parents have an opportunity to use what they learned from the boys themselves to find more overlap between their in-school and out-of-school reading experiences. My study reinforces the strong relationships between disengagement in reading and lack of competence or selfefficacy already cited in the literature.